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Henry A. Kissinger
Former Secretary of State; Author, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?
In terms of current challenges in American foreign policy, the fundamental problem we face is a conceptual, philosophical one. Never before has a country been as dominantly powerful as the United States, nor had global reach in almost every field – military, economic and, to the great sorrow of the French, cultural.
At the same time, the historic experience of America is so unique that the conduct of foreign policy in the traditional sense presents major conceptual problems for us. We are the only major country that has never had a powerful neighbor, that for the greatest part of its history could genuinely believe that its involvement in international affairs was largely up to it, and that it could engage and withdraw. We are almost the only major country with a national belief that almost every problem has a solution and therefore a terminal day to it; that has been, to a large degree, our domestic experience. This is why most of the great American initiatives in international affairs have been presented with some kind of terminal date. The Marshall Plan was presented at solving a problem once and for all.
In the late 1990s, when we sent troops to Bosnia, it was explained to the American public as a one-year project after which we would withdraw. Disraeli described to the British Parliament in 1878, in response to an idea to send troops to Bosnia, the situation in terms that can be applied verbatim to the present situation in terms of religious and ethnic hatred. He said it would take 50,000 of Europe's best troops to calm the situation and that they would be there indefinitely. There is no argument: There are situations in which we have to intervene even if it means a prolonged stay. But another aspect is that we find little in our experience to indicate that when you deal with an issue, you really deal not just with one problem but a whole sequence of events.
In the 19th century, a European statesman said, "Policy is like a play in many acts. It unfolds inevitably once the curtain is raised. People can comment on the quality of the play, but the really important question is whether you raise the curtain, because once the curtain is raised the play will be completed either by the actors or by the audience that mounts the stage." We see something of that in Kosovo. We entered for important moral convictions, but we entered also into the legacy of three Balkan wars, into the question of whether we want an independent Kosovo. If we don't want an independent Kosovo, should American troops be used to prevent self-determination? And if we have an independent Kosovo, what happens to Macedonia, Montenegro and other countries with substantial minorities? This is not a new war but a continuation of a centuries-old contest.
I'm not going to go into the history of individual decisions but what we face at this moment in terms of long-range thinking. We don't have an overwhelming enemy as we did in the Cold War, but we have treaties in many parts of the world. We have environmental problems that were never considered part of foreign policy 20 years ago. We have an economy of globalization but a politics of national interest; how to relate the economic and technological evolution of the world to the political evolution is one of the key issues before us. As Americans there is a tendency for us to believe that our unique experience can be made universally applicable; many Americans think that every foreigner is an aspirant American.
Very often we tend to believe that it is our duty to recast the structures of every other country. Last week I was in Russia and met with President Putin. The first thing I was asked afterwards was "What did you tell him about Russian reform?" Here's a country that has had 600 years of turbulent history, and while I strongly favor reform, we still have some fairly long-range problems. Is Russia going to face east or west? Do you integrate it into Europe? How does it relate itself to NATO? Can NATO survive with Russian membership? Can Russia be responsible if it is isolated?
When we think of the world as responsive to a uniform set of solutions, I would argue that there are different kinds of worlds that exist out there for the U.S. to deal with right now.
Latin America and most of Europe, west of Russia
In those countries with democratic governments and market economics, military conflict is highly improbable, and the values that have made America great are applicable in the day-to-day conduct of the societies. Many of the disagreements between us and Europe reflect the following strange phenomenon: When we deal with individual European countries we can often form a consensus, but when we deal with the European Community as a unit their expression is almost always criticism of the U.S. So in the long run one of the issues that must be settled first by the Europeans and then within the North Atlantic region is whether common purposes can be developed in the absence of an overriding threat, or whether those who share similar histories are doomed to repeat the weakness of Western civilization: the inability to submerge selfish or particular interests in a common good.
Asia
With Asia we deal with a structure that is comparable to Europe in the 19th century: countries that think of each other as potential strategic and economic opponents in terms of equilibrium and balance of power rather than of integration. For America the challenge of a country like China is to avoid the temptation to slide it into the position vacated by the Soviet Union, as a kind of permanent enemy against which all our efforts have to be directed.
As a military threat, China is insignificant for the next 10 to 15 years. It had a military budget in 1999 of $12 billion. Even at $20 billion, that is still less than half of what the surrounding countries have: Japan having $150 billion and the U.S. over $300 billion. Whatever danger China represents in terms of its economic evolution and what might have happened 20 to 25 years ago, our challenge is how we can best affect that today, whether by a policy that is open to cooperation or by a policy of confrontation that may feed Chinese nationalism.
Do we assume it will happen anyway and start trying to reduce the Chinese evolution at a moment when political changes are inevitable? No country can undergo the economic changes that China is undergoing without some changes in the political structure. In 2003, the current Chinese leadership will change; they have a 70-year-old retirement age and a two-term limit, which will catch everybody at the current top level of China. A lot depends on how we interpret the future.
The Middle East
If we go to the Middle East we are in Europe of the 17th century: a period of religious, ideological conflict in which, paradoxically, the surest way to produce an explosion is to attempt to bring about a final settlement, forcing each side to accept things that they might acquiesce in, in the name of coexistence, but cannot accept in the name of permanence. This is why last year the very idealistic and very American attempt to bring the two leaders of the Palestinians and Israel to Camp David, trying to settle in one week those deep conflicts, produced not progress towards peace, but emphasized the most radical elements who then took charge of the subsequent debate.
Changing Conceptual Thinking
In almost every country, domestic politics overwhelm long-range foreign policy thinking. Much foreign policy thinking is geared to timetables that are much shorter than the historic process. In dealing with this issue, we also face a profound cultural transformation. I belong to a generation that was brought up on books; I can't even type. When you're brought up on books, you must train your memory and develop concepts because you can't keep rereading the same book all the time.
Foreign policy requires an ability to grasp the past and project it into the future. For any problem that has a practical, relatively short-term base, training on computers presents an enormous advantage over the previous way of learning, but it does not produce an incentive to train your memory, or to encourage conceptual thinking. There is a disparity between the ability to solve technical problems and the ability to solve historical problems. This is one of the distinguishing features of our period.
In the 15th century, when printing developed, there was a huge expansion in the realm of knowledge. As learning shifted from pure memory – without books – to the availability of a vast expansion of knowledge, it also led to the disintegration of the universal church and the so-called Holy Roman Empire. It took 150 years of political turmoil until thinking adjusted to the new reality. The doctrine of national sovereignty that people often criticize today as one of the sources of international tension developed as the human rights doctrine of that period; it was designed to prevent the incursions of foreign armies, in the name of religion, into the territories of countries and to substitute some domestic order for what had turned into a European-wide civil war.
These are some of the challenges facing us that I've tried to deal with in my book, summed up in a proverb – or an alleged proverb – that a Chinese friend told me: "When there is turmoil under the heavens, little problems are dealt with as if they were big problems. And big problems are not dealt with at all. When there is order under the heavens, big problems are reduced to little problems and little problems should not obsess us."
The fundamental challenge before the world today is whether we can recognize and distinguish big problems from little problems, whether we can reduce big problems to little problems. After all I've said about the difficulties America has in forming an overriding concept, there is no other country that has the optimism, self-confidence and faith that America has shown. This is our opportunity and, in a way, our obligation; we cannot solve every problem, but few of these problems and none of the fundamental ones can be solved without us.
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